


on the floor

by preromantics



Category: Center Stage (2000)
Genre: Character Study, F/F, OFC - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-30
Updated: 2010-12-30
Packaged: 2017-10-14 06:05:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 725
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/146180
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/preromantics/pseuds/preromantics
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Instead of dealing with the pressure through yoga, or through braiding people's hair, or painting her nails, or however everyone else wants to spend their shitty night, Eva goes to the dance club. (Eva/Vague!OFC)</p>
            </blockquote>





	on the floor

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted 06/24/10

Instead of dealing with the pressure through yoga, or through braiding people's hair, or painting her nails, or however everyone else wants to spend their shitty night, Eva goes to the dance club. 

She dances until her shirt is sticking to her back -- it was barely there in the first place, and until her skin is shining, reflecting bits of the club lights in pieces of body glitter rubbed off on her from people pressing too close.

She says, "fuck off," to the guy who asks for her number afterward.

He says, "I'd like to see you bend that way on my sheets, baby," and sometimes she's that kind of girl but not for guys like him (and sometimes not for guys at all.) She takes the cigarette he offers her, though, and she lets him light it, his hands close to her face, and then she walks away, shoulders high.

He calls after her as she walks back out onto the floor, edging through the intermittent dense masses of bodies, of people who can't dance and of people who have rhythm in their sleep.

Eva knows people are watching her, she knows the way she's holding her head high, pretending like nothing else matters, not the stress of company picks or of the way she sometimes has to stop and look in the mirror before she showers and scrutinize her body, go back out into the real world and remember that she owns herself, that nothing anyone else says should matter. She's in control. 

(Except for when she lets herself think about it, and then she needs nights like these, her cigarette held above her head, eyes watching her through the crowd, catching the deliberate movements of the lines of her body from the bar. No one she knows, only herself and the floor and the pounding of music and the real  _life_ , not the shit contained in the academy. This is the city, and it's Eva, too. She thrives.)

She looks for a partner, although she set out only to lose herself alone. The guy at the bar, though, and the ones from before -- guys who grabbed her around the waist as she danced, tried to make her move with them, hip to hip, nothing elegant or studied about it -- those guys need to know they can't have her.

She likes inelegant and unstudied, sometimes in the way a person moves on the dance floor and sometimes in the crash of lips on lips, but she doesn't like that sort of thing unwarranted. 

She sees a girl moving in the middle of the floor, small, a dancer's body, a tumbler of what looks like gin or brandy, no girly, fruity drink with calorie counts. Her head is up as she moves, the beat sort of latin right now, pulsing through the floor, but when she looks down she catches Eva's eye, strong and a little defensive, _come here_.

Eva won't be ordered to go anywhere. To dance with anyone, unless it's for her career, for her life -- but here, she steps forward. She takes a deep drag of her cigarette and inhales, flicks it to the floor. When she presses herself up against the girl, her hands small on Eva's hips but her fingers digging in hard, they dance too-close, and Eva is aware of the people watching, feels sort of triumphant for it.

She only lets the girl move them for a second before she pushes back, and their dance becomes a sort of crashing fight, a push and pull, and Eva doesn't think about anyone watching after a while; she doesn't think about the morning or keeping her back straight and her toes pointed, she just moves, and the girl moves with her.

In the morning Eva looks at herself in the mirror before she showers, rings under her eyes and hair a mess down her back. She has bruises on her hips and marks on her collarbone and the memory of skin against her fingertips, another fight, another fuck, but different. She leaves the bathroom after with her head high, ready for the shit of the day, for the shit of the rest of her life, so long as she can dance in clubs and get what she wants and sometimes get things she didn't even realize she wanted, too.


End file.
